Friday, January 13, 2012

Over the last 12 months I've been working on some pretty nice System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) projects but I find that the larger the customer site / IT infrastructure, the more repetitive tasks there are to be carried out!

One such project I've been working on requires the creation of over 90 distributed applications that will reflect each of the remote sites around the globe that SCOM is monitoring. Each of these 90 distributed applications would contain the exact same component groups - for example, they'd all have a Domain Controllers group, a File Server group, an SQL group and a Web Sites group. The only difference for each of the 90 distributed applications would be the actual windows servers that would be members of each of the component groups as they would be specific to each of the sites they were located in.

To build a distributed application with only four component groups is real easy but the problem is when you have to go and create the same distributed application 90 times - not fun!!

This process will work exactly the same on both SCOM 2007 R2 and SCOM 2012 and I'll be demonstrating this on SCOM 2012.

SCOM 2007 R2 comes with three distributed application templates:

Line of Business Web Application

Messaging

Blank (Advanced)

SCOM 2012 comes with four distributed application templates:

3-Tier Application (360)

Line of Business Web Application

Messaging

Blank (Advanced)

Although a new distributed application template (3-Tier Application (360) - see my previous post on this for more information) has been added to SCOM 2012, it is still limited to 3 tiers and a client perspective component group which probably won't be flexible enough to fit in with the type of distributed application you might want.

As a result of these template limitations, I set out to build my own template that incorporated all of the customer specific component groups that I wanted and one that could be easily deployed alongside the default templates that came out of the box with SCOM.

To begin with, we will first need to download and then install the Windows Software Development Kit from the following link:

Preferred Product

Preferred Product

Speaking at Experts Live

Total Pageviews

Subscribe To My Blog

LinkedIn

Twitter

My Books

About Me

I'm a Microsoft MVP for System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management and am working as a Senior System Center consultant for Ergo based in Dublin, Ireland.

I really enjoy the fact that we are in a constantly evolving industry that requires us to up-skill as much as we can and one that provides us with new products and solutions each year to make the job all the more interesting and ever changing!